Black Widow Demon (Demon Outlaws)

by Altenburg, Paula

  But Columbine was long dead now, and Raven was safe in the mountains with Blade, a man who did not need or want Creed’s help in protecting her. That left him without any responsibilities other than to the leaders of the Temple of Immortal Right—and therefore, to the Godseekers.

  As he waited by the stall to speak with the woman, Creed noted there were no signs of a husband or master about. He wondered why not. Women were not free in this world, and despite her obvious maturity, she retained far too much of the physical perfection that had once captured the interest of a full-blooded demon for her to go unnoticed in a market such as this. Her young son could not possibly provide sufficient protection for her here.

  Unless, of course, he had a significant gift for compulsion.

  The woman finished with the customer and turned to her son, as if ignoring Creed’s presence would somehow avert an unpleasant confrontation. While she pretended not to notice him, Creed was well aware of her sidelong scrutiny. And what she saw.

  He was not unprepossessing. Most women found the vibrant contrast between his golden skin and unusual, crystalline blue eyes attractive. In the past he had shaved his head because his black hair, which had a tendency to curl, had made his physical resemblance to Raven too obvious, and he had not wanted others to suspect they shared a father. If they had, they might also have begun to wonder who that father had been.

  After the departure of the demons, however, Creed’s scalp had gone smooth. The tattoo that now covered his back and shoulders had also emerged, although he had no idea what its purpose was or if it held any demonic significance. He could hardly ask.

  The woman ran a palm down the front of the tidy apron that covered her unremarkable dress, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the heavy fabric, an action that betrayed her nervousness at his presence. Women usually loved Creed, and while he was not above using that attraction to his advantage, normally he would not be passing judgment on one of their children. Most mothers placed their child’s welfare above everything else.

  But not all of them did so. His had not.

  And this mother’s child was also half demon.

  “Where have you been?” she asked the boy. “I expected you here to help me an hour ago.” Her tone held reproof and a lot of anxiety, as well as an undercurrent of unmistakable affection. Soft green eyes darted from the masculine hand on her son’s shoulder to Creed’s face. “He’s a better salesman than me,” she added, with pleading in those eyes as if she already knew without being told what was at stake. “I need him.”

  A gift for compulsion would indeed benefit her sales and keep them both from starvation. Creed’s gut tightened. There was no husband or master. Not that he could tell. Without the boy, this woman’s fate would be uncertain and undoubtedly hopeless. Condemning one would mean a death sentence for them both.

  Since Creed sensed nothing but truth in either of them, he saw no pressing reason to remove the boy from his mother. The only fear in her was for her son, not of him.

  He released his prisoner. “I don’t doubt your son is good at sales,” he said. “He seems less inclined to use his skills of persuasion to avoid trouble, however. You might want to impress upon him the advantages of walking away from a fight rather than diving in without careful consideration for the consequences. No one willingly draws the attention of Godseekers.”

  “Thank you,” the woman whispered, her green eyes filling with tears of gratitude and relief.

  Creed walked away without further comment, confident the implicit warning he had delivered was enough, and threaded his way through a crowd that paid him little attention even though he dwarfed most other men. One of an assassin’s greatest attributes was an ability to move about unnoticed, and Creed, thanks to his demon father, was better at it than most.

  He finally located the jail he’d been seeking on a narrow street backing the temple. It was flanked by green-fingered desert palms and a faded mercantile. He climbed three stone steps and entered the low building. Inside it, the high, narrow windows positioned beneath the ceiling beams offered interior lighting while protecting the room from the worst of the dry desert heat.

  A tall man, seated in a straight-backed chair, bent forward over a heavy oak desk. He coughed into a crumpled handkerchief, his bony shoulders shaking. His face was as gray as the walls. The rattling cough, combined with the unhealthy pallor to his flesh, suggested the odds were good that he was also dying.

  Creed waited in silence until the coughing fit subsided.

  “I’m looking for the sheriff,” he said once it did.

  The man mopped at his mouth with the handkerchief. Although reflecting ill health, his gaze was intelligent and thoughtful, as if he had not yet given up on living. He tapped the badge on his chest, then extended a hand. “You found him. The name’s Fledge.”

  Creed took the offered hand and shook it as he introduced himself. “I represent the Temple of Immortal Right and the Godseekers. I was told you might have information regarding several children who have gone missing in recent months.”

  Sheriff Fledge tipped back in his chair. “Why would an assassin be interested in a few missing children?”

  “It’s not the children who interest me as much as the circumstances in which they’ve disappeared.”

  Fledge hooked a chair near the desk with the toe of his boot and flipped it around, then gestured for Creed to take a seat. Creed dragged the chair to the far corner of the desk so that his back faced a wall, not the door, and a slight grin crossed the sheriff’s thin face.

  “I don’t have much hard information,” Fledge said, “but there are all sorts of rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  The good-natured smile faded. “The kind that says those children are spawn. That there’s a whore hiding in the Godseeker Mountains who’s one of them. That maybe the Demon Slayer is to blame for all the spawn we’re starting to see around here by taking up with one when he should have been protecting people from her and her kind instead.”

  Creed paid little attention to the term whore. It was not meant with any disrespect, only as a distinction. Women, owned by men in this world and used as they pleased, were one of three things—wives, daughters, or whores.

  But Creed disliked the term spawn, especially when used by a mortal. It was a slur against all half demons—and an intentional one. He especially did not like hearing it associated with Raven, who was the “whore” on the mountain Fledge mentioned. She and Blade, her lover and a former assassin, had begun a new settlement in one of the many abandoned mining towns, where they welcomed half demons who wished to live in peace.

  He thought about what else Fledge had said. The sheriff had heard that those missing children were spawn. The last time Creed had seen Willow, she’d had a misshapen and feral demon child in her company. The memory of that pitiful creature, and how she had used it, continued to haunt him.

  Perhaps Raven was not the whore Fledge referred to.

  “So you’ve heard of a woman in the mountains and of the Demon Slayer, who’s reported to be in the Borderlands,” Creed said. “It doesn’t sound to me as if either of them could be held responsible for children who’ve gone missing in the area around Desert’s End.”

  The sheriff’s gray face reflected his agreement with Creed’s assessment before another coughing spasm overtook him. By the time he recovered from it, his whole body was trembling. “If you’re wanting someone to hold responsible for their disappearance, maybe you should disregard the rumors and consider slave traders instead. And if you’re interested in hearing about child slavers in particular, the man to discuss that with lives about three miles out of town on a kyson ranch.” The sheriff paused again to catch his breath. The rattling sound in his chest filled the silence of the empty jail. “He sold the son of his whore to them about a year ago and would have driven a hard bargain. Maybe this season the slavers decided to bypass him to save money.”

  That was a reasonable assumption and one worth check
ing.

  Creed got directions to the ranch. As he rose to go, the sheriff stopped him.

  “If it turns out slavers aren’t responsible, have you asked yourself who else might have taken them?” The sheriff leaned forward, steadying himself against his desk. “What if they were simply abandoned because nobody else wanted them?”

  Creed had once seen what a mutated, feral, half demon child could do to a man, so he understood people’s fear. But half demons were not entirely to blame for the changes taking place. No longer under the rule of the immortals—goddess or demon—the world had no true law anymore. As far as Creed was concerned, people could choose to make a better place of it or a worse one. What was guaranteed was that it would not be the same. And if mortals were to coexist with half demons, a new path to the future needed to be blazed.

  Creed believed he had an obligation to help make that happen. He had a sworn duty to the Godseekers but an inherent responsibility to others like himself. No matter what the world thought, half demons were mortals too.

  “Whether it was slavers who took them or they were abandoned,” he said, “what I do know is that those missing children deserve justice, the same as anybody else.”

  …

  Nieve pressed both palms to her aching back as she stretched out the cramps she’d acquired from bending over all day, planting seeds in what was to be the kitchen’s vegetable garden. Every bone in her body ached.

  The ranch she had called home for the past four years stretched for miles beneath a seamless roof of royal-blue sky. An enormous herd of beef kyson roamed wild in the blowing grasses and scrub brush littering these farthest edges of the demon desert, where the animals would forage and fatten until roundup in the fall.

  The unpredictability of the kyson made it unsafe for Nieve to wander too far from the protective fencing of the compound surrounding the ranch house. The shaggy, long-horned beasts were as ill-tempered as their owner, Bear, and she feared them equally.

  Wolven, another threat, had been heard howling the past three nights, and Bear had ridden out early that morning to check on his herd. While adult kyson had little to fear from them, calves and yearlings were a different matter. The long horns and thick frontal skull bones that kyson used for defense did not fully develop until their second season, leaving their young vulnerable to wolven fangs and claws.

  Despite a dull ache of loneliness she could never quite escape, Nieve preferred these hours of solitude. In another lifetime, before her world had been turned to blackened ruins by a demon who had professed to love her, her days had been filled with light and laughter.

  Demons might be gone from the world now, but it would be a long time—if ever—before she lost her fear of them. And while she had given up on hating Bear a long time ago, she would never lose her fear of him either.

  She stared across the desert foothills to the jagged mountains with emptiness gnawing at the raw edges of her heart. She could not shake the belief that she had lost something of inexplicable and infinite value to her, yet no matter how hard she tried she could not recall what it was. At night she dreamed of it , but in the morning the dreams were gone, leaving seeds of discontent and sorrow sown in their wake.

  Nieve shook herself. The sun was beginning to set and Bear would return soon. When he did he would want his dinner on the table, and the bruises from the last beating she’d received were not yet faded.

  She turned to the low, sprawling log house and saw a stranger, larger even than Bear, striding toward her. Alarm rippled up her aching spine. At first, with the setting sun at his back, she could not see much about him other than his outline, but it was the stealth of his approach that truly frightened her.

  It made her think of demons.

  He stopped a discreet and reassuring distance away from her. She had a better view of him now, and the small trowel poking from the hand-harrowed dirt at her feet seemed an inadequate weapon when she compared her slight size to his.

  With wide shoulders and long, lean legs, he wore typical desert clothing—a homespun cotton shirt and neckerchief, thick denim trousers tucked into knee-high leather boots, and an oiled canvas duster. He did not wear a hat, however, and his shaved head was as bronzed as his face. The golden hue of his skin made the mesmerizing blue of his eyes even more vibrant and compelling, and she found she could not look away. Kindness and good humor radiated from their depths.

  She blinked several times to dispel an unexpected, hypnotic appeal. The harmlessness he transmitted served as a lure to calm her fears and made her immediately suspicious of him. Nieve was not an innocent and impressionable child, and although now that she had a good look at him she could not believe him to be a demon, she knew danger when she saw it. She tore her eyes from his to fix her attention on his hands and any threatening movements he might make toward her.

  “I’m sorry,” the giant said, the gentleness in his voice matching the kindness of his eyes, at odds with the rest of him. Those strong, agile-looking hands remained motionless, however, and he maintained a discreet distance. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  A pulse thrummed in Nieve’s throat, and she had to fight an urge to run. If she’d thought it would do her any good she would have, but it would not. She had no choice but to face him as bravely as she could. Showing fear was the worst thing she could do.

  “No?” she asked, her unsteady voice betraying her nervousness. “Then why approach me on foot? Where is your hross?”

  Those beautiful blue eyes smiled benign innocence at her from his too-handsome face. “Beside the stable.”

  He’d been spying on both her and the ranch and had seen she was alone. That made her even more afraid.

  He realized it, too, and his expression changed again, this time to sympathetic understanding. “If I’d wanted to harm you,” he added, still speaking in that gentle tone, “I would have done so by now.”

  That was true enough. But since Nieve could not recall the last time anyone had been deliberately kind to her, suspicion ran deep. While she had taken great pains to ensure she did not attract undue notice from men, and the few she came in contact with on the ranch rarely spared her a single glance, let alone two, she sensed that this one saw past her dowdy, shapeless dress and the faded black neckerchief that covered her white-blond hair.

  “I’m looking for a man named Bear,” the stranger continued. “I was told he might have some information I need.” He considered the purple-streaked horizon. “If possible, I’d like a place to stay for the night, too. I saw wolven tracks on my way out here, and my hross is nervous.”

  Nieve began to back toward the house, ready to bolt if her knees would allow it. “My master will be back at any minute,” she said. “You can wait in the yard by the stable if you wish to speak with him.”

  The stranger did not make any move to follow her. He simply watched with observant eyes, very quietly. When she was close enough to the kitchen door to make a run for it, she turned and dashed inside. She slammed the door shut behind her, then dropped the wooden bar that locked it into its brackets. Her heart hammered beneath her ribs the entire time.

  Coward.

  She pressed her back against the solid door, and closing her eyes, tried to steady her uneven breathing. Her trembling knees gave out, and she slid the door’s length to the floor.

  Whoever the unsettling stranger was, he was Bear’s problem now.

  Keep reading for a flashback to

  the first book in the Demon Outlaws series

  The Demon’s Daughter

  by

  Paula Altenburg

  Prologue

  Year 330 PD (Post Demon Occupation)

  The Goddesses’ Mountain

  The mountain was on fire.

  Only a few days prior, ten priestesses had dwelled in its catacombs. Now, none but Desire remained. The haven the goddesses had built against demons had proved to be no haven this day.

  She shivered despite the intense heat, thankful that the demon fire no
longer had enough force behind it to sear the entire world. That did not mean it wasn’t devastating still.

  She ran a hand over her shaved head—a symbol of her service to the goddesses—and tried to suck a few extra breaths into a chest almost rigid from exhaustion. Pain from her failing heart shot through her left arm.

  A shriek rang from one of the deeper chambers, splintering the unnatural silence, and Desire hurried toward the sound. Murmuring a small prayer at the door, she crossed the gleaming marble floor to the shrouded bed where a woman, belly grotesquely swollen, panted through the last of a contraction. Desire had suffered three stillbirths of her own in her younger years, and could only stand by and watch helplessly now.

  The contraction passed. The woman on the bed opened eyes of such a vibrant shade of indigo blue that Desire never failed to marvel at them. Sweat-dampened skin glowed golden in the muted light, the only indication that the woman was not what she appeared at first glance. In this world, the goddesses assumed mortal form and lived a mortal existence. Here, their lives were as fragile as any other.

  Yet no goddess had ever before given birth.

  After a few ragged breaths, the goddess’s eyes again drifted closed. “I am dying.”

  Desire feared she was right. “As soon as the baby is born, you can rejoin your sisters,” she said.

  The goddess shook her head. “I can never rejoin them now. Not after what I have done.”

  “Have you done something so terrible?” Desire asked gently. “You fell in love. That hardly seems such a great crime.”

  The goddess grabbed Desire’s arm. Her voice dropped, taking on an edge of formality. “Hear my confession, Priestess. I have lain with a demon.”

  “It is not my place to hear your confession,” Desire protested. She tried to draw back, afraid to listen to secrets not meant for mortal ears, but the goddess would not release her. “You are above this.”